Branching out!

So when I first started out, I made tons of stacking rings. I was working primarily in silver and doing a lot of birth stone stacking rings for moms and grandmas. It was fun and I was just grateful that anyone was buying anything from me. It was right in the middle of the great recession and contrary to all of my pessimism I was actually making a living doing my jewelry thing. It was shocking and to be honest I sometimes still don't believe it 8 years later.

This is just a small sample of the stacks I worked on during that first year or two. There are a lot of people out there with topaz as their birthstone. Or perhaps my sample isn't representative. LOL. I feel like that period was endless ring stacks. SO MANY STACKING RINGS.

But while I was tirelessly tapping out the stacks, I also had a chance to make some different pieces and experiment. It's so strange when you first start making jewelry, the number of things that you've made is just so limited. I think when I opened my etsy shop I had made like 10 rings total, in my life. Crazy.

I was just searching through my Etsy sales record to find some of these photos and it was a real walk down memory lane. So weird. (On an unrelated note, I find the relatively recent change to human life, where everything you've ever done is photographed and follows you around for all of eternity to be both convenient and disquieting. Thoughts?) But as I look at some of these, I'm reminded of that Janis Joplin song...."freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose". And that is really what it felt like. I had just started making jewelry and it was sort of a fun side thing, though I was actually doing it full time and it was my "job". I hadn't yet become a jeweler or jewelry designer in my head. So I really had nothing attached to it mentally and I had the space to just experiment. I think I'm actually back in that space right now, after 5 years doing mostly bridal and having all of my spare processing power taken up by these two cuties: